


The colors of the sky

by Yuppu



Category: The Expendables (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2014-11-14
Packaged: 2018-02-25 09:55:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2617586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yuppu/pseuds/Yuppu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Galgo remembers some of the most important moments of his life by the color of the sky in that moment</p>
            </blockquote>





	The colors of the sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jesuisherve](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jesuisherve/gifts).



It was an hot, damp day and the air clinged to clothes and made every breath heavier than it should have been. Galgo never forgot that day. The sky was a bright shade of orange and the clouds were covering the sky, it was unsettling.

Gloria had just kicked him out of the door again, to clear his head. That’s what she said when she meant she was not pleased with something he did.

Every time, Galgo did his darndest to try and do what she might have wanted, but apparently it ranged from ‘pointless’ to ‘stupid’ with a side of “you’re never gonna be a man, are you?”.

Galgo never understood why she kept saying that. He was a man, he was a soldier in the Legion, what more proof could he have that he was?  
He had brought it up with the team, but they did not seem to know what to tell him. Mingo and Tiger just exchanged a look and Torres just blurted “why do you keep going back to that bitch anyway?”. Galgo didn’t know what to say then and now he was even more confused. He loved Gloria. He wanted to marry her. They had been together for four years, after all. Sure she was a bit rough around the edges, but she loved him. And when they fought and she hit him or slapped him it did not really hurt, she was not strong enough. And he could not give that back to her, now, could he? That’s not what men did, men needed to protect their women, not hit them back.

Heavy, orange-reddish drops of rain started fallinf at his feet and Galgo hurried to the door, knocking for Gloria to let him in.  
She did not even come to the door.

He started shouting, ringing the bell, knocking harder.  
It took ten minutes of intense badgering before Gloria stuck her head out of the window, yelling at him to grow up and stop complaining about a bit of rain.  
Galgo gave in and started walking away.  
By the time he reached Tiger’s house, the rain had stopped and he was soaked in a grainy orange sludge.  
Tiger opened the door and tilted his head. “Uhm.”  
“Man this rain was absurd. Gloria kicked me out. May I come in?”  
“You’ve got to stop letting her do this to you, man, that’s your house.”  
Galgo walked in, waving his hand for him to please cut it out. “I don’t even want to know this kind of shit this orange shit is.”  
“That’s saharan red sand, brother, makes you feel right back in Morocco, right?”

“How the hell did it get in the rain?”  
“Sandstorm. It’s in the clouds, that’s why the sky looks so terrifying today. Go shower, I’ll lend you some clothes.”

 

Tiger always did that. He took care of him, he worried for him. Tiger was a bona fide mother hen to him and the others. To the point where his nickname came from the scars he got from helping his old troops, three jagged scars on his right cheek. And Hernàn Pereira Delgado started going by Tiger and showing those marks with pride.

As a sniper he learned to be patient and most importantly he learned to be observant. And over the years, he had observed Galgo descending into a progressively deeper pit of hell with Gloria. She had found a good-hearted man who was stupid enough to fall in love with her and she seemed fully focused on destroying him and Tiger could not stand for that.

He waited for Galgo to come back from the shower to decide and take action.  
“Tell you what, friend, I’ll call the guys over for dinner.” He announced, and Galgo still had no idea what he was going to do.

But Tiger knew, he knew that if he was going to get Galgo away from Gloria, he needed the rest of the team to support him in explaining that his relationship with her was at the very least unhealthy if not downright abusive.

 

An hour later, after occupying Galgo’s time by making him cook dinner - Galgo loved cooking, he loved it, it made him sing and dance in the kitchen, it was good for the heart to see him like that -, Tiger sat the whole team for dinner and Pepito had to be restrained from helping himself to everyone else’s portion as usual, Mingo and Torres were far more interested in the reason for the impromptu reunion and half-way through dinner, Tiger stopped everything to look straight at Galgo.  
“I called the others here because I want today to be the last time Gloria kicked you out. I know this is not normal. We all know this is not normal. Galgo, we know you love her, but she doesn’t love you enough to treat you better than a dog to put outside and yell at when it’s not obeying.”  
Galgo felt his heart stop and sink into his stomach. “Guys, we’ve talked about this, it’s fine… she loves me.”  
“Galgo, she threw a plate at you and threatened you with the shards. It’s not normal. It’s not what happens in a relationship. You’re her punching ball and I’m done condoning it.” Torres said, staring right at him. “If you want to get out of that house, you can stay with me. It’s no problem. But you need to get out of there.”  
“My couch is always free! But Mariana will need a few days to be okay with that…” Pepito offered, shrugging.

Seeing his teammates, his brothers genuinely worried and ready to help made him decide to try and see what would happen if he stayed away for just a few days. Maybe he would see Gloria in a different light.

And just like that, in that strange day that had begun with an unusual orange sky, Galgo was pulled from his abusive relationship.

 

The sky over Benghazi was bright blue. Cloudless, perfect, the same light blue a child would use in drawing a beautiful day. But it was not a beautiful day and Galgo felt the sky was mocking his pain.  
Behind his head, the blue sky; in front of him, a cargo of coffins. All full.  
José ‘Pepito’ Vargas Llorente occupied the biggest of them. His big heart and his roaring laughter would never warm Galgo’s missions ever again. He had a child at home, a five-year-old boy who sent him drawings every week, drawings of him going back home and being with his family and in the background a sy as blue as the one he was being shipped home in. How cruel could fate be, against a man who never had had a mean thought in his life.

Hernàn ‘Tiger’ Pereira Delgado rested in a coffin that would never be opened, not even to let his family honor and mourn him. The shots that took his life took off his jaw. And Galgo could do nothing but watch in horror and scream, before a shot ran right through him.

And when his instinct kicked in and made Galgo try and run to pull his body out of the line of fire, Mingo paid for his stupid moment of panic.

Domingo ‘Mingo’ Milagros Ramirez was shot to the ground by a jacketed round in the moment he came out of his shelter to try and stop Galgo. His coffin was full because of his stupidity and Galgo knew it. It was a casket filled with his stupidity and his survivor’s regret. Mingo deserved better, Mingo would have never endangered them like that. He was always calm and he always did exactly what was needed, he managed, somehow, to not let his heart run his missions. But Galgo did and Mingo would have never let him hurt himself and that killed him.

Seeing him fall froze Galgo on his feet. Everything was unraveling around him, his head couldn’t keep up and all he felt was an indescribable pain that clenched his heart.  
He only got a hold of himself as Torres called his name, but just as soon as he looked at him, the impact of a bullet right against his sternum pinned him to the ground.

For a second he thought he would die, unable to get up and move. Another round made his way to him, this time flying through his upper chest, where his body armor was already torn to shred, and penetrated his body with a gush of blood.  
Torres lost his head at that. He could not see him but he heard him scream in anger and shooting against the unending enemy lines.

At the end, Galgo saw him drop at his side, blood running from his mouth in a coughing fit until he was shot through the head. And then his head dropped on one side and Galgo found himself staring at his lifeless eyes before it was too much.  
Galgo fainted and when he came back, the reinforcements had finally arrived and he saw them trying to recover every corpse they could recognize.  
Colonel Lieutenant Carlos Agüero Torres, deceased, he heard. Through his oxygen mask, Galgo whispered a ‘no’, full of desperation and pain. His whole team, his whole family was gone.

And he, who should have been the first to go in all of them, was still alive.

He still contemplated the unfairness of it all on the plane. There were more coffins that he could care to count.

One would have been too many, but that, that was too much.

And finally, after two days in which he was too shocked to react, Galgo burst into tears.

Still the light blue sky mocked his pain. And he knew he would never again be fond of a cloudless, light blue sky.

 

After a lifetime of bright, bold colors marking the most important days of his life, Galgo looked at the sky as his new team climbed into the plane and he was surprised to find such a dark color. Not quite black, not just blue. It almost veered on violet. Indigo. That was the word. His new life began on an indigo sky.  
It was different from his old one. He missed the bickering and laughing and chattering that always followed them. It was strange, this silence. Galgo felt it like a pulled tooth. He felt something was missing and that it had a painful wound underneath. He tried not to think of that, but it hurt.  
So he boarded, making it his mission to fill the silence.  
He started blabbering as soon as he sat down, but he was studying his fellow teammates. It was pretty clear they were still divided after all, the young ones looked kind of wary of their older counterparts, but there was some peace that was falling way short as they first arrived.  
Even the tall one - Gunnar? Some strange scandinavian name that sounded like a weapon - seemed much more calm now. He was leaning against the partition behind Barney’s seat, as if that was what gave him his peace. One of the younglings was practically falling asleep and he kept  rubbing his eyes - it did not occur to him for a second that he might, in fact, be disturbing him with his relentless chatter.  
The knife man - Christmas, he was sure his name was Christmas - glanced at him from above his shoulder now and again, and then he shook his head every time.  
Not that it did anything to stop the unending river of words that he kept spitting out.  
After being elbowed over and over by Lee, Barney turned around to try and silence him - although he thought they all deserved to have their ears talked off just as he had.

“Hey, how about some music to celebrate the mission?” He proposed, and before anyone could really answer, he let Lee handle the p.a. to send out music, and somehow it prompted Galgo to shut up, much to everybody’s relief.

What they did not understand, was that filling the silence in any way was enough for him to feel good.  
Galgo sighed and looked out the window, into the indigo sky above Luna’s head.

Indigo.  
It was a really beautiful color. He could see himself really starting again in it.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> you all knew his old team died. I had to. Papito was only mentioned in the unrated version of the movie.


End file.
